The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  “No no, I’m just calling to pass the time of day. As I might with any close personal friend I don’t particularly own. Hell no. You’re free, white and twenty-one, as we used to say in the old days. I just called because I promised I would after our one night of love, and to shoot the shit.”

  “Well,” Margaret said, “it was good hearing from you.”

  “Well,” said the City Commissioner of Streets, at a loss. “Look,” he said, “I know I caught you at a bad time. I just wanted to tell you what a swell time I had last night, and how much I admired your pad, how you fixed it up.”

  “My ‘pad’?”

  “Did I misspeak? You think I’m talking above my station, age-wise? No no, you misunderstand. I meant it as a compliment. You’ve your whole life ahead of you, young lady. You go call real estate whatever you please. But hey, I’m the old-timer in the outfit, what do I know? You don’t like ‘pad’? Showplace, then. How much I admired your showplace.”

  “Thanks,” Margaret Glorio said, “I hope next time you see it you still like it.”

  “Next time I see it,” Druff said. “Hubba hubba.”

  “ ‘Hubba hubba,’ ” Miss Glorio said. “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “Me? This stuff? I’m a gentleman of the old school. I speak a sort of gabardine, like a man in a hat.”

  “I don’t exactly understand why,” she told him, “but it’s kind of cute. Charming.”

  “Like your lovely pad.”

  “What’s with you, Commissioner? Why do you keep bringing the conversation around to my apartment? What are you enamored of, me, or the fact I’m convenient to the good schools, churches, transportation, water and shopping? It’s my business to have nice things.”

  “That’s right,” said the man with the MacGuffin. “I forgot. You’re this buyer, you have important contacts with wholesale. You get the urge, you call you want the furniture moved, and interior designers do you for nothing. You don’t lift a finger.”

  “More or less.”

  “Boy oh boy,” he said, “what perks! Oh, hey,” he said, “would that go even for Oriental rugs?”

  “Oriental rugs?”

  Because he was trying to remember if he’d seen one last night. A little like the rabbi’s, bigger than a throw rug, smaller than a flying carpet.

  “What are you—”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Druff said.

  “Hey there!” said Jerry Rector.

  “Will we see each other again?” Miss Glorio asked.

  “I’ll get back to you. No, really. I will,” he said, and replaced the telephone.

  “An offer is on the table here,” Dan said.

  “Are you giving me to understand I can’t leave? That I haven’t your permission?”

  “No, of course not,” Ham ‘n’ Eggs said.

  “What, are you kidding us, you big lug?” said Jerry Rector.

  “Jerry’s right,” Ham ‘n’ Eggs told him. “Aren’t I the party who warned against conducting business on the Sabbath?”

  “Ham’s got something there, bub,” Jerry Rector said. “There are certain things that just aren’t done.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Ham ‘n’ Eggs, switching sides, “there are psychiatrists in this town who’ll write you prescriptions for dinette sets, bedroom suites, expensive cars.”

  “For custom-made suits,” said Jerry Rector. “Bespoke trousers of cavalry twill.”

  “For ’round-the-world cruises,” Ham ‘n’ Eggs said. “You take it to your travel agent to be filled. She sells you a ticket, and you just take it off your taxes.”

  “There are bugged confessionals,” Dan said, joining in. “Certain priests will sell you tapes.”

  “And lawyers,” said Ham, “who go into the tank for the sake of the look on their clients’ faces when the jury counts them out.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said, “they love that look.”

  “Will you listen to us? We’re giving a City Commissioner of Streets civics lessons.”

  “What you can get away with,” Ham said. “What the traffic will bear. Testing the limits. Pushing the envelope. When there are no more frontiers, you make them up. You strive, you stretch, you reach for the stars.”

  “I heard him say ‘rugs,’ ” Dan said. “I distinctly did. Clear as a bell. He could have been in the next room.”

  “He was in the next room, silly. That’s when we walked in on him.”

  “But I can leave,” Druff said, just checking. “I’m free to go.”

  “Dan,” Jerry Rector said, “there’s still an offer on the table.”

  “Table it,” Dan said generously.

  “Where’s his hat? Did he have a hat? Did you have a hat?”

  “No.” (Feeling humiliated now, glad his girlfriend wasn’t there to see this, glad Rose Helen wasn’t, Mikey, Dick the Spy, Doug the Passive- Aggressive, his cronies and cohorts, the loyal opposition. More than a little downcast, in fact, to be himself on the scene. Well, he was outgunned. Three against one. Four, if you counted the black beadle with his keys to the closets where the brooms were buried, the mops and pails and wringers. Wondering where his powers had fled, the old MacGuffin confidence, backed, he would have thought, by just ages of tradition. Or perhaps his MacGuffin was merely magical, of the self-limiting kind, subject to conditions, stipulations, 5/50 arrangements like a warranty on a car. Subject, that is, to a commitment never to abuse the privilege of just having a MacGuffin, honoring his obligations to it, holding up his end. Maybe he wasn’t worthy of one. Maybe he wasn’t noble enough. Maybe Miss Glorio was a test he had failed. Having sweet truck with her not only a betrayal of his wife but, in a way, advantage taken of one already on her uppers physically, a little old lady practically, hoary-haired, a woman who almost couldn’t keep a battery in her hearing aids, of recent oddball speech patterns and edgy, jumpy attitudes and with a touch, too, of this just perceptible chronic limp. So a question of honor, finally, a matter of morals, of having—quite literally—been found wanting.

  (But whatever. His courage was gone. He felt the absence of his breezy insouciance, the wisecracks and eloquent sort of gabardine he’d claimed to speak—and that they spoke better than he did. The universal language of toughs: “Where’s his hat? Did he have a hat? Did you have a hat?” Well, he wasn’t surprised. “No,” he had told them. They’d taken it from him. Ball in their court now, hat on their head.)

  So what was he supposed to do with the leftovers? (That’s about what he asked himself now, that’s how he felt, as if he’d completely overestimated the appetites of guests at a party.) What was he to do with the leftovers, the leads and clues and flashy circumstantials, if he’d come to the part where his energy flagged?

  Ol’ Bob Druff. Livin’ the Tammany life now. Routine, laid back, MacGuffinless. Yet what a way he’d come!

  Here it ain’t been but a day, he thought, since he’d first surmised the MacGuffin and just look where it had taken him. His first tentative suspicion confirmed, connected to his second tentative suspicion, that one to a third and that to a fourth and so on. By God, he might have been hooking a rug! Because everything was linked, everything. If he had a sidekick (just about all that was missing here) he would tell him so. Begin with an initial observation. Make an observation, would tell him, any observation, any observation at all. Like one guy leading another through a card trick. Everything inevitable and conjoined in the vast, limitless network of things, merged in the world’s absolute ecology. There was, it seemed, no such thing as a loose end. Not in this life, there wasn’t. The universal synergy. In the end, thought our City Commissioner of Streets, all roads led.

  And because they did, Druff, on the street again, who’d just been thinking, hadn’t he, of a sidekick, and what he might pass on to such a fellow if he had one, found himself—because hadn’t he been promised lunch (filet mignon, fresh vegetables, wine, strawberries out of season), which had never materialized, incidentally, and could it have been even three minut
es ago he’d been thinking what could be done with the leftovers?—going into this little coffee shop where he sat in a booth wondering while he waited for his food to come—his rare hamburger, his order of fries, his coffee and pie à la mode—whether he should use the pay phone in the entryway to call Dick.

  He signaled his waitress.

  “Miss,” he said, “do me a favor, will you? There’s this guy I have to call, but, well, to be honest, I’m a little concerned that if I get up and phone him you’ll bring the food while I’m gone and my burger and fries will be cold and all dried out by the time I get back.”

  “No problem,” she said. “I’ll watch you through the glass. I’ll wait until I see you’re off the phone before I bring your order.”

  “Oh, hey, thanks, that’s very kind,” said Druff, perfectly sincere, on his own turf again, back, that is, with folks who’d never tag him, who couldn’t lay a glove on him, touched, actually moved, by the kindness of shockable, susceptible people. “I appreciate that. I really do.” (This part of the universal synergy too.) And with difficulty leveraged himself out of the booth (the quarters always too close in these places—even for a chap dropping into his clothing—their shallow seats and steep backs, the unyielding Formica tabletop in its wraparound metal trim) and made his way to the pay phone between the lunchroom’s heavy inner and outer glass doors.

  “No, I’m sorry,” the woman said, “you must have the wrong number.”

  He quoted the number he’d called.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “There’s no one here by that name.”

  Surprised, he checked it in the directory. Though he knew Dick’s number. He knew Dick’s number. Hadn’t he occasion to call it a hundred times a year? Sure enough. It was Dick’s number all right.

  The waitress smiled at him. She waved. Druff, grinning, nodded acknowledgment.

  “But this was an operator-assisted call,” he explained to the woman. “He dialed it himself. It has to be the right number.”

  Druff could actually hear her turn away from the phone, hear her place her hand over the mouthpiece and, though he couldn’t make out what she was saying, he had a pretty good idea. Get in, he thought, the part about how the operator was a man. Though untrue—he hadn’t gone through any operator—it was, Druff felt, an absolutely telling detail.

  She was back on the phone. “Dick says to ask who is this.” Without guilt at having been caught out, or shame, or the slightest indication that her pride had been in any way compromised. Fucking typical, Druff thought.

  “This isn’t Polly,” Druff said. “You’re not Dick’s wife.”

  “Nolo contendere,” she said.

  Through the glass Druff’s waitress threw him a friendly high sign. The commissioner graciously, broadly, winked. “Tell him,” he said, “it’s his boss.”

  He heard her transmit the message. “What,” she said, “what’s that, Dicky? Oh, okay.” She was speaking to him again. “Dick won’t come to the phone on the weekend. He told me to tell you that drivers get days off, too, and that you wouldn’t even be calling him on a Saturday if he was an Orthodox Jew.”

  “What,” Druff said, raising his voice, “what’s that? What’s he say?” He looked up. At her station, the waitress, concerned, was staring at him. To reassure her, Druff barely shook his head, like a pitcher shaking off a sign. “Listen,” he said, looking to make friends with the woman in Dick’s apartment, “Miss—” And broke off, paused, waited for her to take the bait. She didn’t. “Won’t he come to the phone really? It’s rather important, a matter of quite some interest to him. It won’t take much time. I know it’s Saturday. Of course I do”—and this goes on too, he couldn’t help thinking, that spies get days off—“and I don’t expect him to come fetch me or drive me places. If I had anywhere to go, either I’d drive myself or I’d call a cab. Honest.”

  “Oh sure,” she said, “assume I’m not married, just some limousine driver’s tootsie. ‘Miss’ and ‘Mademoiselle’ me. Just go ahead and make out your stereotypes. If it’s convenient for you to think so, you just make up in your head I’m not a respectable mother of twins. Well, my name is Charlotte, incidentally, if you’re so all-fired interested. No, I’m not Polly. I’m not Dick’s wife. Only I don’t know where a person like you would get off. A married man, so-called, traipsing around at all hours of the day and night.”

  While she spoke, Druff gazed placidly through the coffee shop’s glass outer door to the quiet, empty, late-afternoon street. It’s like a decompression chamber in here, he thought. With a pay phone and a cigarette machine. When she’d finished, Druff said, “Just tell him it’s a snow day.”

  “Wise guy,” Charlotte said.

  “No, wait,” he said. (Because he was new at this and didn’t know when to play what he still wasn’t even sure was his trump card. Because City Commissioner of Streets or no City Commissioner of Streets, Druff didn’t even recognize the neighborhood he was in anymore. He was a politician. He knew about fixed elections, what could be done, if necessary, to a voting machine, how any even only decent mechanic could compromise it like a one-armed bandit or rigged roulette wheel. What had any of that to do with MacGuffins? With anything as important and down-to-earth as genuine evil? Because he was new at what he hadn’t even yet begun to understand, and he couldn’t wait. Not that he hadn’t as good a sense of timing as the next man, only that he was impatient, and maybe a little too anxious to have everything done with.) “No, wait,” he repeated. “Ask him if he ever heard of any international rug rings?”

  Impatiently, she relayed his question. Then their connection was disengaged and he heard the burr of the dial tone. Saddened, his good name shot, he went back into the restaurant. At his table the hamburger and fries had already been laid down, his coffee. His sandwich, its meat and juices congealed and gray as brainfat, was cold, his saturated fries limp. The ice cream was melted on his pie like a thin white soup. When he was dead none of this would mean anything.

  So he set off to buy Rose Helen’s batteries.

  It was, as he’d noted, an unfamiliar neighborhood. He was Commissioner of Streets. Of course he recognized the place names. He remembered signing purchase orders for practically every avenue and street he passed, and remembered having authorized the dispatching of crews to probably each of the four corners of this place—to investigate ruptures in the paving, make determinations about the suitability of street signs citizens had requested, to paint white lines and double white lines in the road. Yet he couldn’t say with certainty he’d ever actually been here. He passed commercial districts filled with what were obviously chain stores whose peculiar names he’d never heard before.

  And at last came to a place he knew. Indeed to the very pharmacy where only the day before the very pharmacist who served him now had sold him a condom. (From here, he recalled, he was only three blocks from City Hall. He had virtually drifted across the city, doing, it could have been, some rude, off-course, straying, swerving caricature of last night’s false marathon, making good the elaborate lie he had told to his wife, and repeated to his son, about his heroic walk with McIlvoy and Scouffas.) Maybe it was only the fact that he was on terra firma again, but he had, too, the same distinct impression of safe conduct he’d had yesterday in this place.

  “Do you stock batteries for hearing aids?”

  The man, who had a sort of mechanical but, on the whole, rather soft hospital-corners way of moving, turned lightly away from the commissioner and disappeared down an aisle crowded with an assortment of miscellaneous boxes. Druff felt rekindle his old admiration for the pharmacist’s tight-lipped professionalism and efficient, silent ways. (I, he thought, reminded of Charlotte’s bill of particulars, could use me a little of that.) And in moments was back, a variety of batteries extended on a kind of jeweler’s tray for Druff’s inspection.

  The City Commissioner of Streets, ignoring them for the moment, attempted to make eye contact.

  “You have a choice,” said the pha
rmacist. “Mercury, zinc, or silver oxide.”

  “Three delicious flavors,” Druff said. (Sure it was unwarranted, but maybe the man felt superior. And supposing the druggist’s professionalism wasn’t sincere? Suppose there was something judgmental in it? Maybe the pharmacist even remembered him from the day before? “Yeah,” he could imagine him telling some cop, “that’s him, that’s the one. That’s the old man who came in and bought a rubber off me.” Though Druff, still only on the edge of crime, could not really imagine the circumstances. And, anyway, it was better to needle and do one’s riffs of fluent gabardine than to be brought down—Ham ‘n’ Eggs, his pals; the cold, spoiled food he had left untouched in the coffee shop. It was better to dish it out than receive.) Again he attempted to engage the druggist’s eye. “Too bad you have to work on a Saturday.”

  “We keep the same hours as the department stores.”

  Druff nodded, then went up practically into the guy’s face, backing off only after it occurred to him that the pharmacist might think he was fishing for compliments on the basis of his purchase yesterday afternoon.

  Nah, he thought, he doesn’t remember. Maybe, Friday nights, they get a run on old fuckers. I must be a type. But a type who’d spring for a French letter one day and come back the next for help with his hearing aid? Druff was furious.

  “It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for another party. Look. See? Nothing up this ear, nothing up that one.”